AFTER THE PUB LUNCH, Bruno sits in his car until dusk, watching the house on Pohlman Drive. There’s nothing doing. The street is dead as a doornail.
Bored, he walks to the payphone box on the corner and drops a coin in the slot.
The call connects. ‘Hello?’ It’s his brother, Danny.
‘It’s me,’ says Bruno. ‘You got a shift tonight?’
‘Yeah, I’m on the way out.’
‘Can you feed the cat? I’m tied up.’
‘I think I can handle that,’ says Danny.
‘Did you have someone over last night?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I thought I heard voices, that’s all.’
‘It was just some girl from the bar.’
‘Don’t bring sluts back to the house, okay? Go to their house.’
Danny laughs. ‘Jeez.’
‘I’m not joking.’
‘I know you’re not. That’s why it’s funny. How are you a bloody copper when you’re this fucking charming?’
Bruno looks back up the street at the house. ‘Just smart, I guess. Look …’ Bruno scratches at something on the phone booth’s glass beside him. ‘Just be careful with who you bring home, okay? There’s a gun in my room.’
‘I know there is,’ says Danny.
They’re both thinking the same thing. But they wait it out.
‘Well, brainiac,’ says Danny. ‘I better get going.’
‘See you in the morning.’
‘Yeah. See you then.’
His brother hangs up first.
Danny moved home when their father got sick. Danny did the muck work with that, took their father to his appointments and doled out the medication. It didn’t work, but someone had to do it. Their mother was long gone.
There was five years between them, but with Bruno’s job—seeing what he saw every day—it was more like ten. Danny was still loose and free. Good-looking, easy to talk to. He tended bar down at Seagulls on the border and had no plans for the future. He was still a bit of a kid.
After the funeral, Danny’s only concession to the grief was moving in with Bruno. He didn’t want to keep on living in their dead father’s house, and Bruno didn’t blame him. Having him around again was the best part of a bad era.
Bruno drops another coin into the slot on the payphone. While the call is going through, he unfolds the photo, the one at the bottom of the deck. He’s still walking around with it.
A voice answers the call. ‘Yeah?’
‘It’s me. Someone took photos of us.’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Back in April.’
‘Back in April? What are you talking about? How’d you get this number?’
‘I’m a cop,’ says Bruno.
The line disconnects.
Back in the car, still brooding, Bruno presses his fingers into his brow, trying to massage out a headache. It’s almost dark now. The house sits across the street. Suddenly the lights blink on inside, upstairs and downstairs at the same moment.
The exact same moment. They’re on a timer.
Bruno writes it down, then walks over and hits the doorbell, hearing the chime echo through the interior.
Futile. No one’s home.
He stands in the dark alcove of the house and smokes a cigarette. He’s still standing there when a kid comes past on a BMX bike. The kid stops at the house, opens the letterbox and pulls out the mail, then gets back on his bike and rides off.
Bruno creeps back over to his car, gets in and follows. He finds the kid a minute down the road, riding fast now. They round the corner of Queen Street and head west. Keeping back, Bruno watches as the kid ducks down a side street and winds through the suburbs. Eventually, they come to a park reserve, a place where the creek runs under the street. The kid cuts down a dirt track into the scrub by the water.
Bruno gets out and jogs after him, down a track that takes him to a part of the exposed creek bed, the water barely a trickle across the sand. It’s shallow enough to ride through and the kid is long gone. Bruno crosses the creek and looks around. There’s another suburban street up on the opposing bank. Litter threaded through the underbrush there: chip packets, shop flyers, a pile of old tyres. Heading back to the car, he notices something. It’s a fresh white rectangle snagged in some creek-side grass. A letter. Bruno makes his way down the creek bed and fishes out the envelope.
Phillip O’Grady, 15 Pohlman Drive, Southport.
Bruno walks further downstream and finds more. Thirty envelopes caught in the nearby brush, all of them in varying states of soggy decay. All of them have the same address, all sent to the O’Grady family, and all here because that kid is dumping them in the creek.